The brand-new Yamaha P-105 is an affordable, lightweight digital piano, ideal for home use and stress-free gigging.

Yamaha’s P-105 (current street price in Finland around 660 €) is offered in black (P-105B), as well as in a pearl white finish (P-105WH).

The P-105 is equipped with a Yamaha Graded Hammer keyboard, which offers a feel similar to an acoustic piano: The bass keys put up slightly more resistance than the treble keys.

Thanks to its plastic chassis the Yamaha weighs in at a mere 12 kilos, and it fits easily on your standard X-type keyboard stand. For home use you can also purchase the wooden LH85-stand and the three-pedal LP5A -pedal unit.

In addition to its quality keyboard the Yamaha P-105 also trumps with a full-bodied two-way speaker system offering 14 Watts of power (2 x 7 W).

My Rickenbacker 4003 is finished in silver, and sports the black hardware so common on 1980s Rickenbackers.

Old Rickies from the 1960s use Kluson tuners. Seventies models were most often equipped with Grover tuners. By the Eighties Rickenbacker had switched to Rickenbacker-branded Schaller tuners from Germany.

The original 4001 basses featured triangular „shark-fin“ inlays that went all the way from one edge of the fretboard to the other, effectively cutting the ‚board into many pieces. The Rickenbacker 4003 has redesigned and slightly smaller inlays.

Viewed from the top both singlecoil pickups seem identical.

While the units feature virtually identical polepieces and coils, they do differ in the details. The neck pickup is powered by a single, flat bar magnet stuck underneath the bobbin.

The 4003’s distinctive bridge pickup tone of the Eighties model is produced by using a unique, thick rubber/ceramic-compound magnet that has a large gap (for the wiring)…